Field of the Invention
The embodiments of the invention relate to a method and system for revising electronic documents, and more particularly, to a method and system for suggesting edits to an electronic document. Although embodiments of the invention are suitable for a wide scope of applications, it is particularly suitable for suggesting revisions to electronic documents where the suggested revisions are similar to past revisions of similar documents.
Discussion of the Related Art
In the related art, revisions to electronic documents are performed primarily manually by a human editor. In the case of an electronic document such a legal contract, an editor may choose to make revisions that are similar to past revisions for legal consistency. Likewise, an editor may choose not to make revisions to documents (or its constituent parts) that are similar to past documents. For example, if a particular paragraph was revised in a particular way in a prior similar document, an editor may choose to edit the particular paragraph in the same way. Similarly, an editor may choose to make revisions that are similar to past revision to meet certain requirements.
The related art includes software that performs redlining to indicate differences between an original document and an edited document. Redlining, generally, displays new text as underlined and deleted text as strikethrough. For example: “Within 15 calendar days after execution of the Agreement, Subcontractor shall submit to the Owner a schedule of values allocating the contract sum to the various portions of the work.”
The related art also include software such as Dealmaker by Bloomberg that compares document against a database of related documents to create redlines. The software displays, differences between a selected contract or part thereof and the most common contract or part thereof in the Dealmaker database of contracts. For example, the user may want to compare a lease against other leases. Dealmaker allows the user to compare the lease to the most common form of lease within the Dealmaker database and create a simple redline. Likewise, the user can compare a single provision against the most standard form of that provision within the dealmaker database and create a simple redline.
Many problems exist with the prior art. For example, it may be difficult for an editor to know which of many prior documents contained similar language. Similarly, an editor might not have access to all prior documents or the prior documents might be held by many different users. Thus, according to the related art, an editor may need to look at many documents and coordinate with other persons to find similar language. It can be time consuming and burdensome to identify and locate many prior documents and to review changes to similar language even with the related art redlining software. In some cases, previously reviewed documents can be overlooked and the organization would effectively lose the institutional knowledge of those prior revision. In the case of a large organization, there may be many editors and each individual editor may not be aware of edits made by other editors. Identifying similarity with precision can be difficult for an editor to accomplish with consistency. Additionally, edits made by human editors are limited by the editor's understanding of English grammar and the content of the portions being revised. As such, different human editors may revise the same portion of a document differently, even in view of the same past-documents.
There are also problems with the related art Dealmaker software as it is primarily a comparison tool. Dealmaker can show the lexical differences between a selected document, or part thereof, and the most common form of that document within the Dealmaker database. Dealmaker, however, does not propose revisions to documents that will make them acceptable to the user. Similarly, Dealmaker considers only a single source for comparison of each reviewed passage. Dealmaker only displays a simple redline between the subject document and the database document. Dealmaker does not consider parts of speech, verb tense, sentence structure, or semantic similarity. Thus Dealmaker may indicate that particular documents and clauses are different when in fact they have the same meaning.